So no, it's actually not 'crazy' at all, but from the perspective of a government that has tested radiation on people without their knowledge or consent, has tested syphilis on people, and that has conducted all kinds of human tests (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA) it's very well within the realm of possibility.

And did you forget? It's also unsubstantiated that XMRV is a cause of ME/CFS. So intentionally or otherwise, your comments there are a bit ironic aside from being offensive.

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Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Price for doing nothing- using the significance of an individual who shares your view is one of the basic logical fallacies you will learn in philosophy 101.

As per the syphllis, etc. - it might be a good idea to use examples that are not 70 years old. And among those examples you might want to find ones where the Government actually engineered a virus, and disseminated it.

As it turns out, creating a retrovirus isn't quite the simple scientific project you seem to think it is.

The problem with conspiracy talk is that any idiot can sound knowledgeable by simply alleging things they can't possibly prove- just like the 911 conspiracy theorists. And then the burden of their wild speculations falls on everyone else.

Children do that with no sense of the gravity of their words. Grown ups should know better.

Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Price for doing nothing- using the significance of an individual who shares your view is one of the basic logical fallacies you will learn in philosophy 101.

As per the syphllis, etc. - it might be a good idea to use examples that are not 70 years old. And among those examples you might want to find ones where the Government actually engineered a virus, and disseminated it.

As it turns out, creating a retrovirus isn't quite the simple scientific project you seem to think it is.

The problem with conspiracy talk is that any idiot can sound knowledgeable by simply alleging things they can't possibly prove- just like the 911 conspiracy theorists. And then the burden of their wild speculations falls on everyone else.

Children do that with no sense of the gravity of their words. Grown ups should know better.

Is that insulting? Yeah, probably. But accurate.

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Barack Obama doesn't have anything to do with any of this. That's called a "red herring." I took Logic 101, but apparently you didn't.

HIV was first detected in humans in 1959, over 50 years ago. Using examples from 50-70 years ago of human tests the CIA did on the unwary public is therefore actually in the same time period, not to mention the fact that US military biological weapons research programs were started decades earlier in the 1940s. I guess that flew over your head, or else you also failed math 101. Or else you have zero intelligence and aren't capable of understanding the idea of there being precedence for that behavior. Or maybe you're just trying to be an #sshole (and succeeding at it quite well).

You have absolutely no idea what scientists are actually capable of doing or not doing. You're not a scientist, and you don't work for the CIA or military. That makes your unfounded dismissals from a position of pretending to be some kind of expert look kind of idiotic. Scientists have declared that the virus can in fact be spliced together from HTLV-1 and other viruses. Hearing you spout off about what in your uninformed opinion scientists can or can't do is amusing, however.

You can't prove the virus was created in the wild with no human involvement, either. So your arrogance is beyond astounding. Actually, I think you are probably almost completely clueless about your own lack of logical ability, so it's more like smug and pretentious ignorance than arrogance. Either way, it's kind of ridiculous to be lecturing other people about "logic 101," with your condescending b.s. about "children and grown ups" when you are so demonstrably deficient in critical thinking ability yourself.

At least this thread has reminded me why I don't post on this forum much anymore. What a bunch of jerks - posting all kinds of anti-Israel crap that has nothing to do with the topic, then saying that the person who objects to that owes an apology to the one who posted it! Wow. Now I'm being subjected to this insulting crap from these other jerks. Why are they allowed to insult people with their "crazy talk" pronouncements and crap like this guy just flung at me? If you don't like my opinion, then too bad. Just keep your attacks to yourself.

I always seem to get sick when I come to this forum. I can post on music and other forums for weeks/months/years and never have a problem. As soon as I come here I get attacked and sick by intolerant people who want to argue over stupid crap and just can't let anyone else have a different opinion than they have. I don't think that's a coincidence. Intolerance is toxic.

From Scientific American
Regis ... interested himself in what the U.S. and other countries did during and after World War II to develop methods of biological warfare. With the aid of the Freedom of Information Act, he obtained more than 2,000 pages of formerly secret U.S. government documents on the subject. They form the foundation of this account, which traces the U.S. biological weapons program from its inception in 1942 to its termination by President Richard Nixon in 1969 ... By then, according to Regis, "the U.S. Army had officially standardized and weaponized two lethal biological agents, Bacillus anthracis and Francisella tularensis, and three incapacitating biological agents, Brucella suis, Coxiella burnetii, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus. The Army had also weaponized one lethal toxin, botulinum, and one incapacitating toxin, staphylococcal enterotoxin B." ... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/080505765X/clarymeuserassoc

Scientist are just like anyone else - they can do truly terrible stuff if the circumstances are right.

But the idea that HIV was created as a military weapon just doesn't make sense. HIV is a rubbish biological weapon - it takes to long to spread and too kill people. They didn't have the technology to engineer HIV's ability to affect humans back then - and even if they did, such a big artificial jump in the viruses evolution would be detectable to those looking at the development of HIV.

If they'd wanted to 'create' HIV they would have had to expose loads of people to a monkey virus and hope that it would eventually evolve in a way which allowed the species jump... a bit of a crazy thing for them to try doing, especially as they'd have had no way of knowing about this monkey virus's ability to cause such damage to humans back then. I'm not sure if there's any reason to think we even knew about it back then.

And we've got no positive evidence that anything like this did happen.

So it's (as far as I know) possible something like that could have happened... but lots of things are possible. That's no reason to believe they're likely.

Scientist are just like anyone else - they can do truly terrible stuff if the circumstances are right.

But the idea that HIV was created as a military weapon just doesn't make sense. HIV is a rubbish biological weapon - it takes to long to spread and too kill people. They didn't have the technology to engineer HIV's ability to affect humans back then - and even if they did, such a big artificial jump in the viruses evolution would be detectable to those looking at the development of HIV.

If they'd wanted to 'create' HIV they would have had to expose loads of people to a monkey virus and hope that it would eventually evolve in a way which allowed the species jump... a bit of a crazy thing for them to try doing, especially as they'd have had no way of knowing about this monkey virus's ability to cause such damage to humans back then. I'm not sure if there's any reason to think we even knew about it back then.

And we've got no positive evidence that anything like this did happen.

So it's (as far as I know) possible something like that could have happened... but lots of things are possible. That's no reason to believe they're likely.

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Who says HIV (or AIDS) was their objective? Who says they would even know what any particular agent they happened to create would do? Do you understand that sometimes researchers just research things because they DON'T know what might happen and want to find out the result? I.e., that they're curious? "I wonder if we can do XYZ? I wonder what XYZ virus would do?" Many of the world's scientific "advancements" were nothing but accidents, in fact.

Did you know X-rays were discovered by accident? No one set out discover x-rays because they knew what they might do and that they might be useful. They were discovered by accident when a scientist was studying some other kind of rays. Did you know that the concept of allergy was discovered purely by accident when some dogs that had been previously injected with a toxin and lived died much faster the next time they were injected with even smaller amounts of the same toxin? No one knew that was going to happen, it was an accidental and unexpected discovery. The guy who discovered it got the Nobel Prize for it (oh wait - that means nothing because some Barack Obama hater says it doesn't ). Did you know that penicillin was also discovered purely by accident, when a scientist noticed that one of his moldy petri dish samples into which a tear accidentally had fallen had not colonized into bacteria, and he decided to look into it further? He didn't intend to find penicillin, it was a total accident.

Scientists don't always know what they are doing or what the outcome of their experiments or research is going to be. Often the results are unexpected. The good scientists who turn those accidents into discoveries all share one thing in common, however - one thing that most here seem to lack: an open mind.

That you think there's good reason to believe the military played some role in creating HIV? In spreading it? In encouraging people to get infected with moneky viruses? I just don't see any reason for believing any of that.

The discovery of penicillin does nothing to change that. That chance and luck has played a role in so many scientific advancements (although I thought vaccines were developed following the observation that milking maids seemed to have developed immunity to the pox because of their exposure to a milder animal alternative) doesn't seem to work as an argument in favour of military intervention in the development of HIV.

That you think there's good reason to believe the military played some role in creating HIV? In spreading it? In encouraging people to get infected with moneky viruses? I just don't see any reason for believing any of that.

The discovery of penicillin does nothing to change that. That chance and luck has played a role in so many scientific advancements (although I thought vaccines were developed following the observation that milking maids seemed to have developed immunity to the pox because of their exposure to a milder animal alternative) doesn't seem to work as an argument in favour of military intervention in the development of HIV.

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Accidental discovery is actually the point of the whole thing, whether it's the accidental discover of penicillin or anything else. What on earth do you think I was talking about?

I never said anything about spreading it or encouraging anyone to get infected with it. It's like talking in a black hole here. In fact, I have several times explicitly used the word "accidental" in many different contexts: accidental creation, accidental release. Did you just entirely ignore all that?

The military was heavily engaged in biological warfare research for many years, including engineering bacteria, viruses, and whatever other weapons they were developing. That is a fact. It is not inconceivable that HIV might have been the result -- INTENTIONAL OR NOT -- of some of that research, and it is not inconceivable that -- INTENTIONALLY OR NOT, ACCIDENTALLY OR NOT -- the virus got released somehow. It's all well within the realm of possibility, and many have said as much.

I'm done. This place is bad for my health. I seriously have a lot better things to do than to nitpick and argue about this kind of stuff on a CFS messageboard. It's ridiculous.

I don't see that you've posted anything that could make anyone think this was likely.

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I have no idea what you're talking about. I've posted nothing but things that make it seem possible. Whether I think it's likely or not is my own opinion. Apparently alternative opinions aren't respected or allowed on this board.

But it's actually much more plausible to believe that HIV created itself and "jumped species" from a single monkey to a single human in 1959, even though humans have lived in close proximity to monkeys for tens of thousands of years with no such "jump" before. Right, that makes much more sense.

Monkeys now have even infested high density populations more than ever before, in India most notably. So why has it not "jumped" anymore? It "jumps" once, into a lone guy in 1959, and that's it? It somehow knows it has infected humans and doesn't need to "jump" anymore?

Yes, that is so much more plausible. It "jumped" once, and then it stopped. I believe everything I'm told, too. The military and CIA have never done anything to hurt anybody, CFS is all in your head, and there's absolutely no evidence for it whatsoever. Experts agree, everything is "fine." Have a nice day!

From Publishers Weekly
Between 1949 and 1969, the U.S. Army conducted over 200 "field tests" as part of its biological warfare research program, releasing infectious bacterial agents in cities across the U.S. without informing residents of the exposed areas, Moreno reveals in this chilling, meticulously documented casebook. A professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia, Moreno (Arguing Euthanasia) served on a ClintonAappointed advisory committee that blew the lid off the government's secret radiation experiments from WWII through the mid-1970s, which involved the injection of unwitting human volunteers with plutonium, uranium and other radioactive substances. His disturbing new book partly overlaps with Eileen Welsome's The Plutonium Files (Forecasts, Aug. 2), though Moreno's survey extends furtherAfrom Walter Reed's turn-of-the-century yellow fever research to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study; from army and air force mind control experiments (1950--1975) involving ingestion of LSD and incapacitating chemicals by thousands of subjects, often without their consent, to the compulsory vaccination of Gulf War GIs with botulism toxin vaccine not approved by the FDA that may have contributed to "Gulf war syndrome." While Moreno duly excoriates the excesses and horrors, his overarching thesis is that human military experimentation is unavoidable, and he commends the army's current infectious-agent research program at Fort Detrick, Md., as a model for future "ethical" research. Some readers may welcome his coolly detached chronicle as a complement to Welsome's scathing, far more powerful expos?. Agent, Betsy Amster; 3-city author tour. (Oct.)

They knowingly injected people with plutonium and other highly radioactive substances, knowingly and secretly released infectious bacterial agents in US cities, injected people with botulism toxins that are tied to Gulf War Syndrome, gave people LSD without their consent, exposed people to all kinds of other dangerous chemical agents without their consent, and god only knows what else - but it's completely 'crazy' to wonder whether they might have been involved in HIV or even XMRV? Right, that's just 'crazy talk,' sure it is.

From Scientific American
The infamous Nazi medical experiments on human subjects represent an extreme of government arrogance. But many other nations, including the U.S., have done similar if less egregious things, usually in the name of national security. Radiation, chemical agents and disease-causing agents are tested on people who have not given informed consent and may not even know they were test subjects. Moreno, professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics there, decided to pursue the subject after his service on the presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 to investigate allegations of government-sponsored radiation research on unknowing citizens during the cold war. He tells of secret medical experiments, some ancient but most during and since World War II, by many nations. "If there is a single lesson to be gleaned from the story of military-medical human experiments," he says, "it is that we can expect them to continue in the future.... I believe it is also true that these experiments can be done ethically."

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So the people who have studied all this fully expect these kinds of things to continue in the future. And yeah, sure - it will all be done "ethically." The CIA and US military - which most recently has been literally torturing people - is nothing but completely 'ethical.' Just like the CDC. Yep, it's just one big military imperialist empire of ethics, of course.

We merely had mysterious outbreaks of a strange disease in two completely disparate regions of the country - Incline Village, NV and Lyndonville, NY - completely out of nowhere, and the military couldn't POSSIBLY have had anything to do with that whatsoever - even though they are known to have infected cities with biological agents before. Right, it's totally impossible.

I know that if I wanted to completely disable an enemy force, I can't think of a much better way to do it than to give them all chronic fatigue syndrome. One day they feel like they have the flu, the next day they can't get out of bed for the rest of their lives. Pretty damn effective if you ask me, with the added bonus that it doesn't appear readily transmissible from infected hosts, minimizing the risks to civilian populations and your own troops by enabling you to target only exactly who you want to target. You couldn't conceive of a better weapon, not least of which because it doesn't just kill the person outright - which would be much less of a burden on the remaining forces - but just makes them sick and would take valuable resources to deal with them. Unless you just heartlessly leave them for dead on the battlefield and walk away.

And even if the military had nothing at all to do with HIV, or XMRV - which quite possibly they didn't - do we really think the US military has no contact with the CDC whatsoever? Do we think they wouldn't be interested in the least in this mystery disease that seems to have arisen out of nowhere and to have no known cure? If we think that, we might be beyond naive. We've already seen their mindset in cases like where the people were infected with syphilis, where they just let them go on progressing with the disease and getting worse and worse so they could observe and "study" the results. It's not a big leap to imagine them doing that with CFS, even if they didn't create or experiment with XMRV - just keep denying it and let it go so we can observe it, similar to how they deny Gulf War Syndrome even to this day. No, it's completely implausible. High level people who run the chemical and biological warfare programs in the CIA and the Pentagon are our friends who just sit around playing cards all day. That's their job. Right.

If there's no evidence in support of your hypothesis, nor in this case, even a likely mechanism by which it could have occurred, then it is a bit crazy to decide that it's highly likely anyway.

Showing the CIA has done bad things doesn't show they were behind HIV any more than it shows they were behind hurricane Katrina.

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And when the 'evidence' is likely buried in thousands of classified documents that it takes teams of lawyers years to get at by having to file Freedom of Information Act suits, you "go and look it" how? Apparently you resolve that by simply believing whatever you are told.

There are plenty of likely mechanisms, we have tons of evidence of likely mechanisms. Just stating there aren't doesn't make it so. I'm not sure why anyone would even dispute that there are likely mechanisms, since they've already been documented in spreading other infectious agents among the population. What appears to be an unlikely mechanism, in fact, is this odd notion of a 'species jump,' one that never happened in tens of thousands of years or ever happened since it allegedly first happened originally in 1959. You know - the idea of the species jump for which you have no evidence.

You have absolutely no idea what scientists are actually capable of doing or not doing. You're not a scientist, and you don't work for the CIA or military. That makes your unfounded dismissals from a position of pretending to be some kind of expert look kind of idiotic.

You can't prove the virus was created in the wild with no human involvement, either. So your arrogance is beyond astounding.

I always seem to get sick when I come to this forum.

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You are naive to assume I am not a CIA agent "Mr. Kite." Feds are keenly interested in those who expose the agencies secrets. Men like you are DANGEROUS, Very DANGEROUS. Perhaps the connection between your sickness flares and your sharing of national security interests is less than a coincidence. Just perhaps.

Damn it, Kite! We're doing our best to close minds- but you just keep opening them back up with your terrific ability to level murderous accusations against the Government by illuminating the unpredictability of scientific discoveries. A lesser man could not conceive of such connections.

The military was heavily engaged in biological warfare research for many years, including engineering bacteria, viruses, and whatever other weapons they were developing. That is a fact. It is not inconceivable that HIV might have been the result -- INTENTIONAL OR NOT -- of some of that research, and it is not inconceivable that -- INTENTIONALLY OR NOT, ACCIDENTALLY OR NOT -- the virus got released somehow. It's all well within the realm of possibility, and many have said as much.

I'm done. This place is bad for my health. I seriously have a lot better things to do than to nitpick and argue about this kind of stuff on a CFS messageboard. It's ridiculous.

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Yes, "Mr. Kite," it is ridiculous and conceivable all at the same time. Saddam Hussein developed Biological Weapons too- Maybe he was the fall guy for a covert Iraqi/US plot to create CFS and disseminate it to the masses. And then maybe- just maybe, Kite- the Iraq War came about because Saddam finally got a conscience and decided it was wrong to keep infecting masses of Americans, And then once he decided to pull the CFS- the US decided he had to go. But unfortunately, after the US was unable to find the stockpiles of CFS it was really looking for in Iraq- maybe, just maybe, they are now being hidden by North Korea, which is why they just struck at South Korea....to keep the attention off of this horrifying ruse.

And Touche' Mr. Kite- you are clearly a busy man. Connecting so many dots saps a man of his time and resources. Who among us should be expected to articulate the workings of a Government conspiracy they themselves have conjured and leveled? It's a pure waste of your precious time to deal with such petty details. You have served us enough.

And when the 'evidence' is likely buried in thousands of classified documents that it takes teams of lawyers years to get at by having to file Freedom of Information Act suits, you "go and look it" how? Apparently you resolve that by simply believing whatever you are told.

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Yes, "Mr. Kite"- the "evidence" is buried deep way too deep to ever be found by a closed mind. I think you've proven your point beyond any reasonable measure- The Government has done bad things in the past which means they most likely engineered CFS and infected us with it. I think it's clear you've proven your point. No need for victory laps here.

I will point out one last peculiarity- K.I.T.E. Kaleidoscope of Internal- Threatening- Evidence

What does this mean? No friggin' idea.

But open your closed minds and figure it out for yourselves you slaves...

You are naive to assume I am not a CIA agent "Mr. Kite." Feds are keenly interested in those who expose the agencies secrets. Men like you are DANGEROUS, Very DANGEROUS. Perhaps the connection between your sickness flares and your sharing of national security interests is less than a coincidence. Just perhaps.

Damn it, Kite! We're doing our best to close minds- but you just keep opening them back up with your terrific ability to level murderous accusations against the Government by illuminating the unpredictability of scientific discoveries. A lesser man could not conceive of such connections.

Yes, "Mr. Kite," it is ridiculous and conceivable all at the same time. Saddam Hussein developed Biological Weapons too- Maybe he was the fall guy for a covert Iraqi/US plot to create CFS and disseminate it to the masses. And then maybe- just maybe, Kite- the Iraq War came about because Saddam finally got a conscience and decided it was wrong to keep infecting masses of Americans, And then once he decided to pull the CFS- the US decided he had to go. But unfortunately, after the US was unable to find the stockpiles of CFS it was really looking for in Iraq- maybe, just maybe, they are now being hidden by North Korea, which is why they just struck at South Korea....to keep the attention off of this horrifying ruse.

And Touche' Mr. Kite- you are clearly a busy man. Connecting so many dots saps a man of his time and resources. Who among us should be expected to articulate the workings of a Government conspiracy they themselves have conjured and leveled? It's a pure waste of your precious time to deal with such petty details. You have served us enough.

That is just way too logical and succinct to be true. If you want anyone to believe what you're saying you really need to connect 5000 dots. 4000 at the minimum.

Yes, "Mr. Kite"- the "evidence" is buried deep way too deep to ever be found by a closed mind. I think you've proven your point beyond any reasonable measure- The Government has done bad things in the past which means they most likely engineered CFS and infected us with it. I think it's clear you've proven your point. No need for victory laps here.

I will point out one last peculiarity- K.I.T.E. Kaleidoscope of Internal- Threatening- Evidence

What does this mean? No friggin' idea.

But open your closed minds and figure it out for yourselves you slaves...

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Be as sarcastic as you want. It just makes you a hypocrite, because you can't definitively prove any 'cause' that you are attributing to it, either. So your sarcasm is misplaced, absurd and hypocritical.

I can accommodate the possibility of many potential causes. Apparently your mind is not so flexible.

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the 'expert's' mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki

I don't really want anything to do with this thread, but I'll throw in my 2p in an attempt to take some of the heat out of a discussion that seems to just be heading for trouble. "Wild" conspiracy theories aren't welcomed by the forum rules, though I'm not sure how I'd define "wild" if pressed into service on that score.

In the absence of any evidence, all these things are possible, but the only thing anybody can say honestly is that they just don't know. Suggesting that the sort of things mentioned here are all possibilities isn't crazy; where it starts to get crazy is when you become absolutely convinced that you have worked out the answer just by theorising and following the dots. People who are absolutely convinced they have the answer, and people who angrily insist that these are absolutely not possibilities, are all failing to be honest with themselves about the limitations of their own knowledge and access to information. Admitting that you don't actually know the big secret, or whether there is one, is a good first step.

Exploring all this sort of stuff can be very entertaining and bewitching but it's worth stopping and asking yourself what you're actually achieving by talking about it. When the discussion starts to get acrimonious, it's time for a reality check. What purpose does it serve to fight and argue and to get stressed over an argument in which nobody actually knows anything and nobody could do anything about it anyway even if they did?

We live in feverish times, with Wikileaks going into overdrive. We all know for sure that there is much that has been hidden from us, and this state of affairs fuels paranoia and undermines our society. All we can do - if we want to be practical and positive - is to continue to call for greater transparency from the authorities, try to keep things in perspective, and try not to let our fears run away with us until they start to impact on our day to day lives and our health.

Be as sarcastic as you want. It just makes you a hypocrite, because you can't definitively prove any 'cause' that you are attributing to it, either. So your sarcasm is misplaced, absurd and hypocritical.

I can accommodate the possibility of many potential causes. Apparently your mind is not so flexible.

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the 'expert's' mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki

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1st) I am not accusing anyone of anything, so there is no burden on me to PROVE anything.
2nd) Please don't twist Suzuki Roshi's words to support your inflammatory accusations. That kind of reckless speech is the diametric opposite of what that man lived and stood for.

I've read that Susan Doyle was clandestinly infected with a voice virus that the CIA loaned to the Brits. The virus was developed at Las Alamos in the late 60's as a potential bio bomb to get Russian men singing on the front. After Dancing with the Stars debacle they'd developed a dance virus, Bristol Palin is in hiding.